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House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) kicked off a summerlong “road show” with a pair of campaign-style stops here. They played with new technology from manufacturing giant 3M and ditched their suit coats for hard hats to tour the new facilities of a family-owned bakery.

They cracked jokes, listened to workers and, at one point, even held hands.

“There is a bit of a bubble in Washington, it’s true,” Baucus told an auditorium filled with about 100 employees at the 3M Innovation Center. “We are trying to break it.”

It’s not clear that such events will move the dial on tax reform. There was no talk about how the two lawmakers expect to move a complex overhaul package when the congressional calendar is currently dominated by immigration reform and will soon become consumed by efforts to raise the debt ceiling.

But like presidents who flee Washington for friendlier locales, Camp and Baucus found themselves speaking before largely supportive crowds who share their sense of urgency.

“Canada, with its 25 percent tax rate, is actually hurting us,” one 3M employee said during a question-and-answer session. “We are losing business that 3M should have here because a Canadian competitor can make it and ship it into the U.S. for cheaper than we can make it and sell it due to the tax rates.”

Still, the lawmakers weren’t able to entirely shake the political realities more than 1,000 miles away in Washington. Baucus, for instance, cast doubt on whether Congress would be able to slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent — the level sought by House Republicans.

“To be honest, I think 25 percent is a bit of a stretch,” Baucus said.

The decision to stop at 3M wasn’t a coincidence.

The company is one of the few corporations to explicitly say they’ll put all of their corporate tax breaks on the chopping block in exchange for a dramatically lower rate — music to the ears of tax writers who constantly hear companies beg for lower tax rates while employing teams of lobbyists to protect special breaks.

Standing inside 3M’s expo-style technology facility, Camp and Baucus said they were committed to getting a tax overhaul across the finish line.

“To make this happen, Dave and I believe it must be bipartisan, we must work together,” Baucus said. “I think we have a very good chance of success. It is like anything else in life — you make your own destiny.”

Most of the questions that Baucus and Camp heard were preselected. At one point, Baucus asked the crowd for a nonscripted question. One employee took the opportunity to ask a question on many minds in Washington: What guarantee do you have that tax reform will actually happen?

“At the end, it is going to have to be a bipartisan bill,” Camp said. “In the middle, it always looks like failure. The object is to get past that.”